Do you know Xul Solar?

My newest hero. Very inventive guy, artist created his own language, characters, and dreamscapes for his paintings. Hung out with Duchamp in Paris and Borges in Argentina.

We went to his museum in Palermo which was originally his house but massively renovated by a contemporary Buenos Aires architect. The space was amazing, but completely overkilled, flaunting south america's propensity (and skill) with concrete form in this orgiastic Carlo Scarpa meets California deconstructivism.

But it was a fun and intense space, much like Xul's work. The space and the work ask you to totally immerse yourself and the journey is pretty amazing.

For Xul's bio and work i give credit where credit is due. I did not write this. It is from Giornale Nuovo (check out my links)

Xul Solar (1887-1963) was an Argentine painter, sculptor, writer, and inventor; a visionary utopian; an occultist and astrologer who yet remained catholic; an accomplished musician who was fluent in seven languages, two of which were of his own devising; and a minor character in Borges’s Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. The following images are scans from the catalogue Xul Solar: Visiones y revelaciones, which was published in 2005 to coincide with a major exhibition of his work, staged in Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Mexico City and Houston.


'Palacios en Bría,' watercolour by Xul Solar, 1932.

Xul’s preferred medium was watercolour, although he also sometimes painted with tempera. Kandinsky and Marc’s Der Blaue Reiter almanac was a powerful early influence on his work, and his mature style is somewhat reminiscent of Paul Klee’s. ‘There are paintings of alternative universes, cities floating in the sky or on lakes, creatures that are half man and half airplane, angels, pyramids and whatever else came to him in his reveries’ (source)


'Vuell villa,' watercolour by Xul Solar, 1936.


'Ciudá lagui,' watercolour by Xul Solar, 1939.

Xul was driven by a restless zeal for revision and reform: considering the Spanish language to be ‘several centuries out of date,’ and moreover, ‘a cacophonous language composed of words that were overly long,’ he developed Neo-Criollo (Neo-Creole), whose vocabulary was mostly drawn from Spanish and Portuguese, but which also incorporated elements of French, English, Greek and Sanskrit. He composed texts and even conversed in this invented tongue which, however, was continually changing, with each successive elaboration of it being different than the one before.

The most important works in Neo-criollo are the San Signos (Holy Signs), a collection of sixty-four visionary texts based on the hexagrams of the I Ching. These texts were written at the request of Aleister Crowley, after a series of meetings between the two men in Paris in 1924. In a letter he wrote to Xul five years later, Crowley reminded him that ‘you owe me a complete set of visions for the 64 Yi symbols’ and added ‘your record as the best seer I ever tested still stands today.’ Although Xul had completed a first version of the San Signos by 1930, only a few short excerpts from them were ever published.


'Zodiaco,' watercolour by Xul Solar, 1953.


Pan-tree (front),' mixed media with watercolour by Xul Solar, 1952. Pan-tree (back),' mixed media with watercolour by Xul Solar, 1952.

In the ’40s, Xul devised a second, even more ambitious language-project: Pan-lengua, a proposed universal idiom with numeralogical and astrological underpinnings, utilising an invented script and a duodecimal number-system, whose entire lexicon could be expressed on the board of Panajedrez (Pan-chess), a game meant to be played on a 13x13 board, but which, according to Xul’s friend Jorge Luis Borges, was impossible to learn, owing to frequent and confusing amendments of its rules.

Aside from language reform, Xul conceived architectural projects, proposed changes to musical notation, and rebuilt musical instruments after his own idiosyncratic design. His need to remake and ‘improve’ extended beyond the artistic & intellectual. ‘With ingenuity and a sense of humor, […] he proposed changes in football: “Why play with one only ball, and not with three or four, and divide the field into six or twelve parallel sectors, like in rugby, and that each player wear a shirt with different letters so that words and phrases are formed?”’

Epiphany Egg

Is there such a thing as one half of an epiphany?

The author Murakami describes two anteaters he saw at the zoo. It was cold and they were tight together completely intertwined so that they were one ball of fuzz. It was a striking image, but useless.

These marooned images sometimes come back when least expected, summoned by some cosmic attraction. Don't let it go! A new whole is formed. A pure, raw, new thought- it is the best type of thought.

Fingers and Fractals

I like how the angles of the mountains look like the jagged edges of the ice, look like the edges of a snow flake. Fractals in a scaled line, orders of magnitude connected in sight and process.

A List of Velocities

It is true; life seems to have slowed down for us since moving here. But sometimes when you are really moving and satisfied, you find that you are taking really tiny steps. And other times you look down and you realize that you've got someone else's shoes on!

It is not always about speed. Sometimes when i am moving really slow something good creeps up on me from behind and swallows me whole. Other times just getting up a good hard pant and maybe a bit of sweat in the pits is enough to feel all right. There are lots of ways of moving toward something:

Fog moving over the ocean.
Up a down escalator.
Hit by a bus.
Straight.
Without brakes.
Like an Albatross.
On the shoulders of others.
Spinning with eyes wide shut/open.
Holding your breath till stars come dancing.